Mickey Mania

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Mickey Mania

There are only two things that make me cringe: TV commercials for feminine hygiene products and cutesy videogames so sweet you can feel your teeth rotting while you play. Yet somehow, Mickey Mania, the latest in a long series of games featuring Disney's ageless rodent, offsets its terminal cutesiness with incredible audio visuals and solid game play.

Programmed by Travellers Tales, which previously released three mediocre platform games (Galahad, Puggsy, and Dracula), Mickey Mania takes the player on a chronological tour of Mickey's most popular cartoons, from his début in the 1928 Steamboat Willie (which starts out with black-and-white graphics and slowly becomes colorized as you progress) to his most recent major appearance in the 1990 The Prince and the Pauper. Each level is filled with skillfully animated bad guys - created by Disney animators - and challenging action. With two dozen levels, umpteen tricky jumps, and several nasty end-of-level bosses, Mickey Mania is surprisingly tough - just the way I like 'em (but probably not well suited to kids much under 10).

While the Super NES and Genesis versions of Mickey Mania are good, the Sega CD version is outstanding. It has orchestrated music (not the monophonic low-sample-rate crap you sometimes get with Sega CDs), a bonus level exclusive to the CD, and dozens of Mickey sound bites that infiltrate your brain, making you unconsciously repeat them while you play. (My personal favorite: the non sequitur "It's a moose!")

Like most games these days, Mickey Mania has an amusingly complicated "hidden" code that avid gamers may ferret out. To cut to the chase, here's the Genesis level skip code: go to the options screen, select "Sound Test," set the music to "Continue," set the sound effect to "Appear," set the speech to "Take That," move the cursor to "Exit," and hold the directional pad left for five seconds. Oh, sure, I could stumble on that by chance!

What really makes Mickey Mania a treat is that it never tries to be hip; it's just fun to play. Quite a radical concept!